1. Field of the Invention
The present invention, in the fields of molecular biology and genetics relates to improved strategies for identifying mutations in populations, based on the use of high throughput sequencing technologies. The invention further provides for kits that can be applied in the methods.
2. Description of the Background Art
Populations carrying mutations, either induced or naturally occurring are used in modern genomics research to identify genes affecting traits of importance by reverse genetics approaches. This is in particular applicable for plants and crops of agronomic importance, but such populations are also useful, for other organisms such as yeast, bacteria etc. Other organisms, such as animals, birds, mammals etc can also be used, but these populations are typically more cumbersome to obtain or to control. Nevertheless, it is observed that the invention described herein is of a very general nature, and can be applied also to such organisms.
Mutagenized populations represent complementary tools for gene discovery, as such populations are commonly used to screen known genes for loss-of-function mutations or assessing phenotype changes in organisms with the mutated gene. The rate-limiting step is the screening work associated with identification of, respectively, organisms carrying a mutation in the gene of interest. Below, the principles of such populations and the screening methods are described in more detail and more efficient screening methods are presented which increase the value of these tools for gene-discovery.
A technology that uses mutagenized populations is known as TILLING (Targeted Induced Local Lesions In Genomes) (McCallum et al., Nat. Biotechnol 2000, 18, 455-457, McCallum et al., Plant Physiology, 2000, 123, 439-442; Till et al. Genome Research 2003, 13, 524-530) relies on random introduction of large numbers of mutations (mostly nucleotide substitutions) into the genome by treatment with ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS) or by ionizing radiation (fast neutron bombardment) (Li et al. The Plant Journal, 2001, 27, 235-42). Every plant in the population carries several hundred (or thousand) mutations, some of which affect normal development, morphology or otherwise confer a phenotype due to loss-of-function (knock-out, knock-down) of one or multiple genes or their regulatory sequences. A TILLING population generally contains a sufficient number of plants to cover all genes with multiple independent mutations (5-20 per gene). A mutagenized plant population used in TILLING therefore usually consist of 3000-10,000 plants and can be used in two ways:
Reverse Genetics
“Reverse Genetics” is the most common way of using TILLING populations. A gene of interest is identified, e.g., by transcript profiling or a candidate gene approach, and the question to be answered is whether this gene affects a particular phenotypic trait of interest. The challenge therefore is to identify one (or several) plants with loss-of-function mutations in this gene. This is commonly performed in a multi-step screening process, typically comprising the following steps:                1. Genomic DNA of a large number of (pooled) M2 plants (e.g., 3072) of the TILLING population is isolated.        2. Pools of equal amounts of DNA from 8 to 32 plants per pool are assembled, with the pooling level depending on the sensitivity of the CEL I screening system (see below). This results in a total of 96- to 384 pooled DNA samples in case of 3072 plants.        3. Labeled PCR primers are used to amplify parts of the gene from all pooled DNAs. Overlapping PCR fragments are used to cover the entire gene (e.g., 3*600 bp PCR fragments are amplified from a 1500 bp gene).        4. Heteroduplexes of the PCR products obtained from the pooled DNA samples are prepared and incubated with CEL I or another enzyme which recognizes and cuts single nucleotide sequence mismatches (e.g., mung bean nuclease, S1 nuclease, Surveyor etc.) and the treated samples are resolved on a denaturing (sequencing) gel or by capillary electrophoresis.        5. Pools containing a plant carrying a mutation in the gene are identified by observing bands of digestion products resulting from CEL I treatment.        
To identify the plant carrying the mutation, PCRs are repeated on individual DNAs of the plants in the positive pools, followed by bi-directional Sanger sequencing.
Plants harboring a mutation are grown and out-crossed to wild-type to establish causal relationship between the mutation and the observed phenotype change.
The advantage of CEL I screening (steps 3-5 above) is that pre-screening the pooled samples saves costs over sequencing all plants individually by Sanger sequencing.
However, a limitation of CEL I screening is that not all identified mutations affect gene function (e.g., silent substitutions) and this is not known until the PCR products of individual plants in a positive pool are sequenced. Nevertheless, the CEL I mediated screening method is cost-saving compared to sequencing PCR products of all plants separately.
Another limitation is that CEL I screening involves running gels and scoring, a relatively cumbersome process that requires confirmation of mutations from the second strand as gel-patterns are not always clear-cut.
A third disadvantage is that CEL I screening is relatively insensitive to mutation detection at the termini of the PCR product which may lead to some mutations going undetected. Further disadvantages of CEL I are that it has been found that the enzyme is extremely sensitive to reaction conditions such as salt concentrations. This makes that the enzyme can only be used in a limited number of buffers, thereby hampering the broad use of CEL I. Another practical disadvantage associated with the application of CEL I is that the enzyme is not reliable in cutting all mismatched heteroduplexes.
Finally, CEL I screening is incapable of distinguishing missense mutations (which are the most prevalent) from non-sense mutations, causing a great deal of screening work carried out on positive pools without yielding interesting mutations.
Forward Genetics
Plants of the mutagenized population are grown and phenotyped for traits of interest. Plants with an interesting phenotype are then crossed to a wild-type plant to out-cross mutations that are not linked to the phenotype of interest. Finally, the mutated gene responsible for the phenotype of interest is identified by positional cloning (using genetic markers), analogous to mapping QTL in conventional genetic mapping populations (F2, RIL etc). Although theoretically possible, mutagenized populations are not commonly used this way.
The present invention was made in part improve the existing strategies for screening of mutagenized populations. It is an object of the invention to provide efficient methods for screening large populations for the presence of mutations and to improve efficient assessment of the mutations for impact on gene function, i.e., to reduce the amount of effort expended on screening mutations that do not lead to altered gene functions. The present methods were designed to avoid the use of the CEL I enzyme or its equivalents.